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Dev tools · October 27, 2023

ScratchDB – Open-Source Snowflake on ClickHouse

Hello! For the past year I’ve been working on a fully-managed data warehouse built on Clickhouse. I built this because I was frustrated with how much work was required to run an OLAP database in prod: re-writing my app to do batch inserts, managing clusters and needing to look up special CREATE TABLE syntax every time I made a change. I found pricing for other warehouses confusing (what is a “credit” exactly?) and worried about getting capacity-planning wrong. I was previously building accounting software for firms with millions of transactions. I desperately needed to move from Postgres to…

ScratchDB – Open-Source Snowflake on ClickHouse launched on October 27, 2023 with 261 votes, #137 of 4,393 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 3% of October 2023

In plain words

ScratchDB is a fully-managed data warehouse built on ClickHouse that handles the operational complexity of running OLAP databases in production. It eliminates the need for developers to manually manage batch inserts, cluster configuration, and schema changes, offering straightforward pricing instead of confusing credit systems. Designed for applications processing high transaction volumes, ScratchDB abstracts away infrastructure concerns like Kafka, bulk loading, and database drivers, letting developers focus on their application code.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Scratch is a swiss army knife for big data. Contribute to scratchdata/scratchdata development by creating an account on GitHub.

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hello! For the past year I’ve been working on a fully-managed data warehouse built on Clickhouse. I built this because I was frustrated with how much work was required to run an OLAP database in prod: re-writing my app to do batch inserts, managing clusters and needing to look up special CREATE TABLE syntax every…

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